Posts Tagged ‘revival’

Ballet West’s The Nutcracker; photo courtesy Ballet West

Ballet West’s upcoming golden anniversary season will include world premieres, a major revival, and longtime favorites, reports The Salt Lake Tribune.

“I have designed our 50th-anniversary season to honor the past, celebrate the present, and keep an eye on the future,” Adam Sklute, Ballet West artistic director, said in a news release announcing the schedule.

The season will open with a revival of founder Willam Christensen’s colorful and dramatic The Firebird, running November 8 and 9 and 13 to 16 at Kingsbury Hall, the birthplace of the company 50 years ago.

The rest of the 2013-2014 season includes:
• The Nutcracker: November 29 to December 28; includes a version of The Nutty Nutcracker on December 30
• The Sleeping Beauty: February 7, 8, and 12-15
• The Rite of Spring (world premiere) by resident choreographer Nicolo Fonte: April 11, 12, and 16-19
• Innovations 2014 (world premiere): May 16, 17, and 21-24

For more information, visit www.balletwest.org. To see the original story, visit http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/entertainment2/56068834-223/ballet-season-west-anniversary.html.csp.

Corruption claims, smear campaigns, and artistic stagnation have dogged the Bolshoi in recent years, and the ballet company hopes a magnificent renovation of its Moscow theatre will revive its fortunes, according to the Irish Times.

Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre finally prepares to reopen in October after a painstaking, and often painful, six-year renovation that will restore the theater to its 19th-century glory, yet includes enough 21st-century technology to satisfy the most demanding director.

The auditorium has been returned to its original violin shape, and fine wooden panels and delicate moldings have replaced the shoddy concrete and plaster that were used to patch up the theater during Soviet times, and which destroyed its acoustics in the process. Experts say the auditorium will once more act like a huge, resonating musical instrument, amplifying the sound of the orchestra just as its creators intended when the building first opened, in 1825.

But some performers and critics fear it will not cure the Bolshoi’s most serious ills. Corruption claims have dogged a renovation that has run 16 times over budget and several years late; Bolshoi Ballet stars have become embroiled in lurid scandals; and a string of high-profile disputes, sackings, and resignations has reinforced the theater’s reputation for poisonous intrigue.

“The company was not really demoralized by all these stories and scandals,” says Katerina Novikova, a spokeswoman for the Bolshoi. “Everybody understands that all this is happening because the Bolshoi is great and famous, and many different forces would love to become its leaders,” she says. “There is a saying in Russia: the dog barks but the caravan moves on.”

The Bolshoi has seen a lot in its time, from the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to speeches by Lenin and Stalin, from Nazi bombs to the artistry of legendary ballerinas like Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya, and the current star Natalia Osipova. To read the full story, visit www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/features/2011/0524/1224297611432.html.